


Snowy Solitude

by AndreM962



Series: Beginnings and Endings [2]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: And the epilogue just makes it worse, Angst and Tragedy, Angst fic, Angst with an unhappy ending, Character Death, Didn't follow the prompts here either, Future Fic, I tried to soften the blow as much as possible but still, M/M, satogouweek2020, why did I write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27827035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreM962/pseuds/AndreM962
Summary: It's been five years since Goh left his family to pursue his dream of catching Mew, and he's closer than ever this time. But things do not go as planned. Past satogou.
Relationships: Gou | Goh/Satoshi | Ash Ketchum
Series: Beginnings and Endings [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036470
Kudos: 36





	1. Chapter 1

_“Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.”_ – Charles Dudley Warner

“This is it”, Goh said to himself. “Mew was last spotted in this location…” He looked around at the cold wasteland around him. “Why would it want to go to such a dreary place?”

There were several mountains ahead of him. Goh simply decided to search each and every one of them. “If Mew isn’t here, then I’ll-“ he paused, as if trying to convince himself of something. “I’ll keep trying. That’s what Ash would want me to do, too.” It had been five years since he had left their home and their two children so he could finally find Mew and accomplish his dream.

He hadn’t had much contact with his family afterwards, sadly. It was just too difficult; every time he saw Ash’s face, he wanted to see it again, and again. If he kept reminding himself of what he left behind, he’d never have motivation to complete his quest.

Fortunately, Ash had been very supportive.

_“What I always liked about my friends and family was that they never tried to convince me to stay with them. They knew how much becoming a Pokémon Master was important to me. This is important to you, Goh. I wouldn’t be able to handle thinking that I’d stopped you from reaching for your dreams.”_ Was what he’d said to him.

Ash had even gone to the trouble of buying him several dozens of new pokéballs so that he wouldn’t run out while on his journey, and a bag to store them all.

_“Look, Goh!” Ash excitedly said while running up to him as he was leaving. “I bought you a parting gift!”_

_“Eh? A bag?”_

_“Not just any bag! It’s a bag for pokéballs! This way you’ll be able to carry more of them. And I even went and put that red symbol thingy you always have on your shirts on it!” Goh picked up the bag and opened it. Inside, he could see several Great Balls, Ultra Balls, Dive Balls and the like, all neatly organized (Ash probably recruited Chloe’s help for that last part). “This is amazing! You bought all of this for me?”_

_Ash gave him a warm smile. “I only want what’s best for you, honey.”_

_Goh kissed him on the lips as he prepared to go outside. “I’ll be back soon, I promise. Take care of the kids for me, will you?”_

_“Sure thing!”_

Goh shook his head. The sooner he finished this, the sooner he could come back to them. He reached the mountain nearest to him and started walking along the mountainside, scanning the area with his Rotomphone for any signs of Mew.

“I hope this is the one that finally pays off. There’ve been a lot of Mew sightings in this location over the years.” The wind howled, and snow began to blow on his face. “A B-blizzard? But the weather reports all said this area was going to have fair weather…”

‘ _Well, you always have to prepare for the unexpected when dealing with a legendary Pokémon, after all.’_

It was harder to walk with the sudden wind, and visibility had dropped considerably. He could still see path ahead of him, but he could barely see the landscape around. And it had gotten impractical to keep moving his phone around, since it could be snatched away by the wind.

Ironically enough, however, the sudden onset of the blizzard only encouraged him. ‘ _There’s no way a natural blizzard could get this strong so fast. It’s obviously the work of some Pokémon. And it would make sense for Mew to do this to keep people off its trail._ ’

Goh began walking faster and faster to compensate for the wind’s interference. “Mew? Mew, are you here? Please, show yourself!” He pleaded, hoping the legendary Pokémon would hear him. He was halfway across the mountain at this point. “You’ve been my dream since I was a child… I can’t go back empty-handed!”

Goh kept walking, and walking, until finally…

He saw a flash of pink hidden behind the hail of falling snow. “Mew?!”

“Mew”, the pink pokémon replied. The blizzard subsided, confirming Goh’s suspicions. Mew hovered in the air, as though examining him.

Goh smiled at it. “It’s been so long. Ever since I saw you at Professor Oak’s pokémon camp, I wanted to see you again… I told my family that I wouldn’t come back until I caught you… and now, that’s going to happen!” Goh laughed, overwhelmed at his own good fortune.

He removed an Ultra Ball from the bag Ash had given him all that time ago, and started aiming. “They’re gonna be so proud of me when they hear how I caught Mew!”

He threw the ball in Mew’s direction. It flew for a long time, but never did it hit its target. Where Mew had been, there was now only empty air.

“Wha- but how? Was it just an illusion?” Goh speculated, having not fully processed what had just happened. Nor would he get time to. He heard a rumbling, and the ground shook beneath his feet. He saw some of the snow and stone dislodging itself from the mountaintop.

“An avalanche…” Goh gulped. He was halfway to the top. There was no way he was going to get back to the bottom in time. “I have to do something!” He opened the compartment of the bag where he stored the pokémon he decided to bring on his travels. “Come on, come on, where’s Aerodactyl?”

Goh wanted so badly to run away, but this was his only option. If he could just take Aerodactyl out of its pokéball, it could carry him away on its talons to safety. But he didn’t manage to pull it out in time…

_SLAM._ A large amount of snow violently collided with Goh, knocking him down the mountain, and causing him to lose his grip on the bag. Goh felt himself roll painfully through the rocky incline until he smacked onto a wall-probably a boulder. Then he passed out.

* * *

Goh felt the wind’s chill on his skin. He shuddered and shifted around. “Rrgh. Just five more minutes, mom.”

His head felt so heavy. He probably had a concussion or something. If that was the case, maybe trying to fall asleep again wasn’t such a good idea.

What had happened again? He was on the verge of catching Mew, but then Mew just disappeared. And then an avalanche, and then he remembered frantically looking on his pokéball bag for-

_His pokéball bag._ Goh forced himself to wake up as he noticed its absence. The impact must have thrown it out of his hands. Where was it?

Goh looked around, but he didn’t see it anywhere. He must have been flung a great distance from where he was. He had to get it back! Coming back without Mew was one thing, but he wasn’t going _anywhere_ without his pokémon friends. Goh got up from where he had been lying, ignoring the bruises all over his body, as well the cold feeling running through his veins – which might not have been entirely due to the atmosphere.

“Where was it?!” He exclaimed, trying desperately to reorient himself, to locate the mountain he had been climbing. But they were just too nondescript, and the blizzard hadn’t subsided enough to let him see everything clearly.

“If I can just locate the place where I came in here from, I’ll be able to find it”, he muttered to himself. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, thinking to check its GPS to find the entrance to the mountain range. His face fell as he looked at the state the Rotom phone was in.

There was a large chunk missing from the top, and the battery had been completely smashed. It must have broken sometime during his fall. It was completely black now; the Rotom inside it had exited it when it stopped working.

Goh bit his lip. His chances of finding his way back were pretty much nil without his phone’s help, but he had to do _something!_

There was no way he was going to give up finding his pokémon again. He was the one who got them into this mess in the first place. He was going to find them even if it was the last thing he did. Forget catching Mew; this was more important. So he began running around the mountain range as fast as possible, searching for his friends.

* * *

Several hours later, he was still searching.

“C-Cinderace? Inteleon! Where are you guys?!” Goh shouted, despite knowing it would be pointless. He felt cold. He felt colder than he ever felt in his life. And hungry.

Every bone in his body was telling him to give up. One part of him, the part of him that so badly wanted to see his friends again, told him he would die before he allowed himself to give up. The other, the part of him that relied on logic, told him that that’s exactly what would happen if he continued like this.

Goh had spent way too long exposed to the elements at this point. He was already starting to feel symptoms of hypothermia. He had to find shelter.

“S-Stupid blizzard”, Goh mumbled. “S-stupid magic, out of nowhere blizzard that won’t end.”

He strained his eyes to try to find the opening of a cave anywhere in the area. When he did, he darted toward it, only to lose his balance and fall to the floor.

It was very tempting to simply stay there, but Goh willed himself to get back on his feet. “I… have to… keep going…!”

He reached the entrance of the cave. He was disappointed to find it was very shallow. It probably didn’t go deep enough into the mountain to protect him from the winds. But he had no other choices. He went inside.

Goh rubbed his eyes to see the interior of the cave better. There wasn’t anything of interest, just a few bug pokémon that scurried away after noticing his presence. “If I had known this would happen, I would have packed some tools to make a fire.”

_‘If I had known this would happen, I would’ve never left home to begin with.’_

“This w-wasn’t the future I wanted. Arceus, it’s been f-five years”, Goh muttered with his teeth chattering. “Five years of denial, of convincing myself this was right thing to do. N-now look where it’s gotten me.”

He tried making himself comfortable in the cave’s rocky floor. He didn’t succeed.

Goh thought about his situation. He was bruised all over, exhausted, hungry, and his hypothermia was probably going to get worse. It was a miracle he even survived this long. A miracle that he didn’t stay unconscious after he fell, a miracle that he lasted for so many hours outside in that freezing atmosphere.

But at the same time, they weren’t miracles, because miracles happened for a reason, and he could hardly buy that the reasons for those was ‘So Goh could get tortured a little longer’.

Goh sat down in the small cove he was in, trying to ignore the cold winds beating down on him.

“Ash… y-you were too good for me.” Goh thought, trying to think about happier times to make himself feel better. But all the memories were bittersweet now, because he knew he could never have them again. He would never make new memories. This was it.

“All you wanted was for me to f-follow my dreams. I was so-“ Goh paused, becoming overcome with emotion as he remembered the moment he decided to leave his family.

“ _I WAS SO STUPID!_ ” Goh screamed out. The echo reverberated through the cave and died out.

“P-please, god, Arceus, Mew, whoever it is that’s out there… d-don’t let me die like this… I-if I get the chance to see them again, I’ll never let them out of my sight. Don’t let me die like this. _Please_.” Goh waited. Seconds turned into minutes. No response.

“T-they were so young. Too young. I bet they- I bet they won’t even remember me. They’ll only remember me from pictures. That, a-and Ash’s stories.” Goh managed to force out a smile at that.

“We were quite the team, weren’t we? Remember… Remember the time we were hunting for those Bulbasaur? Back then, I c-couldn’t even conceive of someone being so selfless… I’d never met anyone like you…

And the time y-you stole that kiss from me when we were helping Koharu out? I was n-never going to have to courage to tell you how I felt, I knew that. I was too afraid of being rejected. I’m so glad you took that choice out of my hands.

O-or what about-*cough*- the time we smacked that giant glowy serpent in the head with a dynamaxed pokéball and actually caught it? I was so p-proud. I felt we could accomplish anything together… t-that’s why all this… leaving you… going on this journey alone… i-it was the biggest mistake I ever made. Without you, I’m n-nothing. I’m less than nothing.

…Hah. I must be getting delusional. Ash isn’t here to hear this.” But Goh couldn’t stop himself from continuing to talk. He knew he wasn’t going to make it – might as well try to make himself feel less alone.

“I fell in love with you so quickly. I just couldn’t see it, a-at first. C-couldn’t see a l-lot of things.” The cold was getting unbearable. Goh put his arms around himself to try to feel warmer.

“M-my dream isn’t to f-find Mew anymore, Ash. I-it’s to find you again. My dream, my future… my future was with you. With my family. I see that now.” He was starting to feel numb. Weak. Vision getting blurry. He was exhausted. Goh wanted so badly to close his eyes and sleep. Sleep seemed so appealing right now…

“Y-you always made me feel s-so… so… Warm…” And with that, Goh closed his eyes, and did not open them again.

* * *

_A few years later_

“W-why does this place haveta be so c-cold?” A young boy asked while shivering. To his side, his father, a tall man wearing a baseball cap and familiar lightning bolt-shaped scars on his cheeks, replied.

“I don’t like the cold either,” He declared. “But you have to learn to adapt to any situation when you’re out on a Pokémon journey! I didn’t let a little cold stop me. Is it going to stop you?”

“No, sir!” the boy declared defiantly while giving his father a salute with his hand.

“That’s right,” the father said, giving the boy some pats on the head and grinning with pride. “Ash Ketchum didn’t raise any of his kids to be quitters!” He said while pointing at himself.

The other child with them, a girl, rubbed her forehead in mild aggravation. “Do you always have to be this overdramatic?”

“Just because you’re a party pooper, doesn’t mean we have to be, Steph”, the boy told her, blowing a raspberry at her to boot.

“Now, now, Howard. Stephanie does have a point. One of the keys to survival out here is keeping a cool head.” Ash said to him. They continued to walk through the snowy mountainside.

“It is p-pretty cold here, though. And snowy.” Stephanie admitted. “I c-can barely see where I’m-OW!” She exclaimed after tripping on something on the ground. Ash quickly grabbed her arm to keep her from falling over.

“That was close! You could have fallen off the edge.”

“Look, there was something hidden in the snow!” Howard pointed out. Indeed, where Stephanie had tripped, there was a medium-sized bank of snow covering an object, though some of the snow had flaked off from the impact.

“What is that? Some kind of bag?” Stephanie approached the object and began wiping the snow off it. “Looks like a satchel of some kind.”

Ash leaned forward to look at it, and picked it up. “Someone probably lost it. It looks like a bag for storing-“ Ash choked. That was when he noticed the symbol in front of the bag. An unmistakable symbol which meant it could belong to only one person. “For storing pokéballs…”

Ash hurriedly opened it, revealing the inside to filled with pokéballs of all kinds and shapes. “T-this is… This is Goh’s pokeball purse”, Ash told them, though speaking more to himself. “But the only reason he would ever leave this is-” Ash’s breath momentarily halted. His face went from shock, to horror, to a crushing sadness his two children had never seen in his face before.

Ash put his hands on his face to keep Howard and Stephanie from seeing his tears. “Goh, _no_ …”


	2. Alternate Ending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A.N. So I really wasn't going to post this at first, but today is Future day for Rubi's Satogou week on her Discord server. I felt I should probably do something with that.
> 
> For those of you who wanted Goh's future to continue with Ash and his family, enjoy this alternate ending.

Goh looked to the outside of the cave, and noticed, once again, a pink blur hovering in the air. He didn’t care at this point if it was an illusion, or his eyes playing tricks on him. With an anger he didn’t know he could still feel, he told the apparition, “I give up. _I GIVE UP!_ Was that what you wanted to hear from me, you little bastard?” No response.

“I’m not going to try to catch you anymore! I’m not! I promise! But don’t you _dare_ let me die like this! I don’t deserve this! I don’t! _I don’t deserve to die like this!_ ” Goh’s voice gained a tinge of desperation. His face fell. “Please. I made a mistake. I just couldn’t give up on you. It was this dream I had since I was a child. Do you have dreams, Mew? What would you do if someone told you to give up on them?” Again, no response. Goh kept talking. “I lost my friends in that avalanche. My Pokémon. They all care about me. I didn’t force them to be my pokémon, I earned the friendship of every single one of them. I’m sorry I didn’t do the same with you.

Not to mention, my family. They don’t deserve this, either. My kids don’t deserve having their father die and never knowing it. And my husband, Ash, he definitely doesn’t deserve this.” This time, there was a response, a curious “Mew?” as Mew got closer to him. Apparently he said something that struck a chord.

“He’s… he’s an amazing guy”, Goh continued saying. “I would be nothing without him. He - * _cough*_ \- always told me to follow my dreams. But my dream isn’t to catch you, anymore. There are some dreams you just have to give up on so you can follow other, more important ones.” Goh took a moment to catch his breath. “And you know what I’m dreaming about, right now? I’m dreaming of seeing their faces up close again. Holding my kids again. Telling Ash how much I love him again. So, please… I know I don’t have the right to ask this of you… but if there’s anything you can do to make that happen…” Goh’s words faded into a whisper. He didn’t know what else to say. He could only hope Mew had listened.

Goh felt himself suddenly being pulled at from all directions. He felt weightless, as though he was being carried by the winds. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling subsided. And he was staring at a familiar wooden floor, where the pokéball bag he had lost was sitting right in front of his eyes. Goh barely had enough energy to react. He was just relieved.

“Goh? _Goh!_ ” Ash’s voice was like music to his ears. He felt Ash lifting him up off the ground, cleaning all the snow covering him. He didn’t have enough strength to stand, so he let Ash support him. “Are you alright? Please talk to me?”

“Fine. Better than before”. He looked up to find Mew floating and staring at him still. “Mew!” the little pokémon said happily, before flying away.

“Goh? Isn’t that…”

“It’s okay, Ash. That dream doesn’t matter anymore.” Goh said to him. Talking was painful, but he felt that he had to get these words out. “What matters is that I’m with you again. That’s all that matters.

Well, that and getting me into a hospital, because I’m about to pass ouuut…”

“Goh!” Ash exclaimed, which was the last thing Goh heard before he fell unconscious again. Everything was going to be okay now. He knew that.

When he woke up next, he was in a hospital bed. He could see two children – His children – staring at him with worry. A boy and a girl. They had become taller since he’d last seen them.

“It’s been so long, hasn’t it? You have no idea how much I missed you. Please come closer. I want to memorize every single detail about you, so that I never forget.” They approached him cautiously, as though he was an illusion that would fade away if they so much as whispered in his direction.

But as they got closer, they could tell he was very real. He was their father. “I’d tell you what exactly I went through… but it’s probably not the sort of stuff you kids would like hearing, yeah?”

“DADDY!” They cried out as they each gave him a tight hug.

Standing at the doorway, Ash smiled at him with pride and relief.


End file.
